Columns: Foundry Focus - The Mark of the BtG

Last week on the Neverwinter Foundry Focus we took a look at A Kidnapping in Blacklake created by Winin. This week we turn our attention to a creation by @Bobcat1313: The Mark of BtG. This mission came suggested to me by a number of viewers of last week’s episode, and was even blessed with Bill Murphy's stamp of approval.

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The Mark of BtG starts off like any good mysterious quest should, with you being tasked to leap head first into the city sewers! This quest ties directly into the canon established during the Neverwinter Saga by R.A. Salvatore. For those of you that have read the books you can probably take a guess as to who BtG stands for, for those of you who have not read the books it stands for (Spoiler Alert) Barrabus the Grey who is actually Artemis Entreri.

It's a ghostly good time

Bobcatt1313 does a excellent job of using lore from the Neverwinter Saga to create a back-story for his own original tale. This mission can be lengthy if you take the time to read all of the information presented to you during the quest chain. For those of you that prefer to click your way through adventures if you select the orange dialog text you will skip to very end of each NPC's text chain. I would not suggest you do this.

In fact, if you really want to learn about Neverwinter this is a great mission to undertake. In addition to learning about the town itself Bobcatt1313 mixes in a few lost DM tomes that you should read and heed. I do not want to spoil the surprises these books have in store for you but be warned, they speak the truth. Bobcatt even has a few humorous riddles mixed into the mission. A quest NPC will ask you “How does a ghost cry?” The correct answer will allow you to advance your quest; an incorrect answer will have you suffer the ravings of a lunatic ghost. This quest is recommended to undertake solo but there are a few difficult enemy packs towards the end that can easily kill you if you are not on your toes. Besides a few misspelled words in the dialog, this mission is excellent from start to finish and I award it a Mithril Star.

Make sure to cast your vote in the comments below on which mission you think should win the 1000 Zen. The prize will be awarded at the beginning of the next episode of Neverwinter Foundry Focus. Vote for either A Kidnapping in Blacklake or The Mark of the BtG.

In other Neverwinter Foundry news, this week Rob Overmeyer stopped by and left a guest developer's blog on MMORPG.com. You can read it here. Rob had agreed to be on last week’s episode of NFF; however, I had to cancel the episode due to unforeseen events (sorry about that). Rob has agreed to reschedule and appear on a future episode. This past weekend was a double astral diamonds weekend. Anything that you did in game that earned you rough AD earned you double the normal amount. Hopefully cryptic makes this a regular event and we see double AD weekends at least once a month. This little bonus goes a long way to encourage people to run those foundry missions, take part in skirmishes, and Cryptic’s own dungeons.

Bark at the moon?

If you have not already seen, Cryptic has teased a new module. I am glad that Cryptic has decided to use the term module. This brings back fond memories of buying D&D supplements that were called modules. But what could this new site mean? Could we see moon worshipping wood elves make their way into the game as a new playable race? Are we going to see a new storyline surrounding lycanthropes in the woods around Neverwinter? Hopefully we will find out more in the coming days. Until then what are your best guesses? I bought the Neverwinter 4e campaign manual to see if I could find out any information from there. I’ll let you know what I think on Thursday.

On a final note we saw a flurry of forum activity over the past week in regards to players exploiting foundry content. Some users are upset to learn that Cryptic is apparently banning players they believe to have exploited the system. We also saw a number of members of the foundry content creation community become very nervous on how the kill XP limiters would impact people participating in foundry content. For the later group Cryptic has already eased up on the kill XP limiter. Players will still earn a decent amount of experience and loot for playing through your missions. If you created a Foundry mission with the goal of doing something other than exploiting you should not be impacted. If you created a mission that had 100 ogres with 1 HP each, well... people will probably no longer be playing your mission. For the group of players that were banned for exploiting Foundry content I am awaiting a formal statement from Cryptic before I pass judgment on how they handled it. I do think banning players without warning them is a little heavy handed and after the fiasco ArenaNet dealt with handing out player bans at the start of Guild Wars 2, you would think Cryptic could learn from ANet’s mistake.

Make sure to keep the suggestions coming to neverwinterfoundry@gmail.com and I look forward to seeing all of you Thursday at 9:30 EDT on our MMORPG.com stream channel for our next episode of Neverwinter Foundry Focus. Thanks for watching and remember, stop and read the quest text.

Robert Lashley / Robert Lashley is a Staff Writer and Online host for MMORPG.com and RTSGuru.com. Rob's bald and when he isn't blinding people from the glare on his head talking in front of a camera you can chase him down on twitter @Grakulen

Robert Lashley /
Rob is a Staff Writer and jack of all trades for MMORPG.com. When he isn’t blinding people with the glare from his head in front of a camera you can chase him down on Twitter, PSN, XBL, and Nintendo @rant_on_rob.